Spearfish Canyon

I went full stache

Went to watch practice at IMS today. Best place on earth.

A bit more cleanup, and you get a final image. The color was there, just brought out by a combination of taking lots of photos, and increasing them.

Finally, you "stretch" it, taking the existing color, and "turning it up".

You then use that software to balance out the background, remove some noise, and generally clean up the image.

But, if you take that one photo again and again, you can "stack" them. AKA, combine them to make one total photo.
Yes, this is done with software, but it's just "adding up" the light from each picture.

First, a simple image. Taken with a small telescope (aka, big camera lens, really. 71mm diameter) and a regular old DSLR. I took a (fairly long) photo. This was a couple minutes, and is more or less right out of the camera. Sky and stars. Like our eyes see.
And a faint fuzzy bit.